Starting Saturday, shoppers in three Northern Virginia communities will have to pay 5 cents for plastic bags, District residents will no longer be able to use gas-powered leaf blowers to clean their yards, and predominantly Black and Latino sections of Maryland’s Montgomery County will gain a stronger voice in local government.
Those changes are part of a host of new laws that will take effect in Virginia, the District and Maryland when 2022 begins.
The actions taken by local and state officials are in part an effort to emerge from an array of challenges seen in 2021: the continuing coronavirus pandemic, percolating racial and ethnic tensions amid changing demographics and heightened worries about climate change after unusually heavy rainstorms flooded local neighborhoods.
“We have worked hard to build a Virginia that works better for everyone who lives here,” Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) said in a statement about the new laws in his state, which Republican Glenn Youngkin, the governor-elect, will oversee after he is inaugurated on Jan. 15.
Among them is an increase in Virginia’s minimum wage to $11 per hour from the current $9.50 per hour, an effort to bridge the yawning wealth gap in the some of the nation’s most affluent suburbs. Under a law that boosts in phases what Virginians can earn, the minimum wage is scheduled to rise again, to $12 per hour, in January 2023.
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